Toby Baker
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Biography
Molecular archeology of cancer
The cancer genome contains an archeological record of its past. The Cancer Genomics and Evolution Laboratory has pioneered methods to reconstruct a cancer's life history from massively parallel sequencing data and has used these approaches to obtain detailed timelines of tumor evolution across many cancer types.
While we now have detailed insight into the drivers, mutational processes and evolutionary timelines of primary tumor development, in comparison, our understanding of the metastatic process is more limited. Nevertheless, metastases cause 90% of cancer-related deaths. The Cancer Genomics and Evolution Laboratory is now using existing molecular archeology of cancer approaches, as well as developing new ones, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer metastases. Through this, we aim to get new insights into metastatic dissemination, and identify new leads for early diagnosis and treatment stratification.
